Arts & Life

Beneath These Masks Is An Artist Conflicted By Junk Food

by
Maanvi Singh
NPR |
Aug. 14, 2014 9:14 a.m.

British photographer James Ostrer purchased about $8,000 worth of junk food over the past two years — enough to fill up six or seven cars.

But all those Mars bars, strawberry shoelaces, donuts and cheese puffs weren’t meant for consumption. Instead, Ostrer caked them on himself and others (with the help of cream cheese “plaster”) to create a series of human sculptures. Photos he took of his creepy-cool creations on candy-colored backgrounds are on display at the Gazelli House Gallery in London through Sept. 14.

The exhibit is called “Wotsit all about” (Wotsits are the British version of Cheetos) and was inspired by Ostrer’s complicated relationship with junk food.

It all started after his parents got divorced, he tells The Salt. He lived with his mother, and “each weekend I used to get picked up by my dad, and he would always be late,” Ostrer says. His parents would bicker and shout. And afterwards, “my dad would always drive my sister and I to McDonald’s and we’d have a Happy Meal.”

Soon, he says, he started turning to junk food as a way to cope with stress. Ostrer is tall, and doesn’t consider himself particularly overweight. But after college, he began to notice that his junk-food heavy diet was making him feel sick rather than nourished. “It’s never going really to make you feel good,” he says.

For this project, Ostrer says he started by designing junk food masks for himself. “I wanted to completely engulf myself in these food types to this extreme level,” he says. Other models included his friends and even his dad.

It wasn’t a comfortable experience. The artist often used colored cream cheese as a base, and layered other foods on top. The full-body treatments took about eight hours to complete, he says.

Sculpting the faces was more challenging and Ostrer has to work quickly. Once the models were fully covered, he only had a few minutes to photograph them. And he made sure to leave at least one nostril open. “Otherwise it would get difficult for the models to breathe,” he says.

In creating each sculpture, Ostrer drew on his mental images of everything from famous works of art to celebrities he’d seen on TV to the ancient people he read about in history class. And the titles, like EF 126.75, are inspired by the European codes for food additives. “The process of creating these was a kind of a cathartic experience,” he says.

Nowadays, when he walks by the aisles full of junk food at the grocery store, Ostrer says he doesn’t feel the same craving for it. “Now I kind of see them as sculpting materials.”